Lucy Parker is another beneficiary of the Courtney Milan rule: the lesser of hers is still the better of most

Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 stars

Lucy Parker’s Act Like It and Pretty Face were a spectacularly good debut and follow-up from a new author, that both guaranteed I’d read anything she delivers. Her London Celebrities series is, generally, a clever setting for a series of romances, with the West End theater scene primed to offer drama from classic artistic temperaments, professional-romantic entanglements, tabloid interference, the world being a little too small, and so on.

We’re first introduced to Trix as the good friend of Pretty Face‘s Lily, as she’s in the terminal stages of unwinding herself from her abusive boyfriend. In Making Up, that relationship is officially behind her, but it has left lasting damage to her self-confidence and sucked the joy out of Trix’s artistic endeavors by causing her to doubt everything she does. Just as she finds herself in the position to take on the lead role in the acrobatic stage show for which she currently performs, someone else from her past arrives, someone with whom she shares a (seemingly) mutual dislike after their formerly friendly relationship went very bad many years previously.

That someone is Leo, an aspiring SFX makeup artist who recently had an allergy-related mishap with a client and is looking to get back in the industry’s good graces. He’s clearly not thrilled to be working with Trix, although it’s also clear that his dislike is jealousy rooted in misunderstanding. Trix is immediately antagonistic toward him and friendly with other men she works with, and Leo takes her for a flake and a flirt.

This is a classic enemies to lovers set-up with a bit of second chance thrown in, and it seems to be a running theme with Parker’s books in the series that the hero and heroine start off on the wrong foot. She’s clearly comfortable working in that area: easily, one of the best features of each of her books so far is the banter between the leads, that runs quite the gamut from gentle teasing to outright insulting, but Parker’s special skill seems to be that she knows the line for each person that cannot be crossed. The barbs may be pointed and true, but they don’t wound to the core; they typically shed light on an aspect of the character that would benefit from improvement. To put it another way, the characters aren’t always delicate or immediately polite, but they find ways of teaching each other valuable lessons through those initial prickly interactions.

Take all of that to mean Making up has all of Parker’s trademark wit, plus empathy and incisiveness, so it automatically has a lot going for it. That said, compared to the first two books, this one clicked with me less. I found that there was a bit too much going on and the multiple points of interference in Trix and Leo’s relationship felt more like a forced gauntlet than a more authentic, slower healing with gradual building of trust. It wasn’t enough that Trix is very freshly recovering from emotional abuse. She also had felt betrayed by something Leo said back in the day, which was the original point for her when their relationship had declined, but in combination now with her recent experience leaves her being understandably mistrustful of people like Leo who she perceives could cause her harm. For his part, Leo in turn had felt betrayed by Trix when he took certain pieces of gossip about her as truth, the insinuations of which would have been a direct insult to him.

Those emotional scars alone would have been enough to work through, in my opinion. But Leo also has to have a younger sister in the picture who is beyond bratty, who is truly just a complete nightmare, absolutely toxic to be around (until the final few chapters.) But until then, she goes out of her way to undermine Trix and in doing so compounds the insecurities Trix is already wrestling with. In addition, there is this issue with a reality show based on their production, and follow-up pieces in tabloids fabricating romantic rumors about Trix and her castmates. Finally, as is customary in romances, each of them has their own “personal mission” plot that needs a positive resolution, with Trix hoping to secure the lead role as hers and Leo hoping to win an SFX contest that guarantees him a job.

Now, I get that romances are often enriched by their b-plots and to have an entire book just acting as a couples therapy session for Trix and Leo to hash out their past grievances and hurts without pause would be pretty heavy. But the particular pacing and priority given to the points of conflict didn’t ring true to me, seeming particularly rushed for the particular items that I would have thought required the most unpacking. Relatively little time in the plot is granted for the pair to work out the issues that are most personal to them, and much of the book focuses on the rest of the external plots and contrivances. For me, this all conspired to make Trix and Leo’s happy reunion a little too clean and bloodless, and a little less believable.

All of that said, it’s my view that a slightly weaker Lucy Parker is still better than most romances I’m likely to read this year. Especially in the contemporary category, which is rife with casual sexism and surprisingly regressive attitudes toward women who aren’t the heroine, Parker’s romances are thankfully women-friendly. Between the solid female friendships and support systems, explicitly feminist themes, and, in Making Up, the admittedly honorable empathy shown toward a nasty character (who happens to be a woman), it makes it easy to trust and recommend all of Parker’s books to any reader.